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Greeley, Gandolfini, and Clinton

The digital edition of the July issue is now available for download. In addition to all the content featured in the print magazine, the iPad, iPhone, and Android version includes serveral digital exclusives you won't be able to find elsewhere:

Five articles written by Fr. Andrew M. Greeley published between 1964 and 2005

Four reviews of James Gandolfini's work published between 2000 and 2009, with a new introduction written by Cathleen Kaveny

A series of photos taken by Catholic News Service showing current events in a visually stunning format

The cover and one article from the July issue we published in 2008 (5 years ago--including a cover story on Hillary Clinton's loss in the Democratic Primary), 2003 (10 years ago), 1998 (15 years ago), 1988 (25 years ago), 1963 (50 years ago) and 1938 (75 years ago)

A link for digital subscribers to recieve a complimentary three month print subscription, as well as a copy of Commonweal Confronts the Century signed by the editor

Sure! At this moment, it is too expensive for us to link print subscriptions with digital subscriptions as many large publications currently do. If you have a print subscription to The New Yorker, for example, you automatically get access to The New Yorker on your iPad. Although we'd like to make that possible for our subscribers as well, it would cost us tens of thousands of dollars every year.

Since we know a lot of paying print subscribers would like Commonweal on their mobile device--and knowing we can't give it to them for free--we have added extra content to justify the subscription rate. We don't like the idea that they have to pay twice, but it's the only way for us to distribute through the Apple Newsstand. If a print subscriber has to pay the same amount again because they would like to read on their iPad, we want them to get more than just the convenience of reading on their mobile device.

The secondary reason this content is not available in print is because we are constricted to a page limit in print, whereas we can include as much as we want in each issue of the digital magazine. On average, the digital version of the magazine includes twenty additional pages of content which simply wouldn't fit in a typical issue of the print magazine.

I hope this has helped shed some light on our thought process. If you have any other questions about our digital sales model, or the digital edition of the magazine in general, feel free to e-mail me at digital@commonwealmagazine.org. I'd be happy to chat with you about our strategy as we are always open to new ideas!

I'd have expected that if one had a paid print-subscription, it would also cover materials you make available digitally. What accounts for the "tens of thousands" of dollars every year that this would cost? Does it cost that much to arrange this technologically? Or is this what you estimate you would lose in revenue if print subscribers got the digital materials for nothing?

The added expense has to do with the software we'd need and the distribution charges to both Adobe and Apple. We're not even factoring in potential lost revenue if print subscribers got digital materials for free. In reality we'd most likely end up paying close to a hundred thousand dollars every year just to those two companies and the revenue we receive from our digital subscribers doesn't come close to covering that, and we don't expect it to for quite some time. Unfortunately the large magazines that many of our subscribers read alongside Commonweal can afford to make this happen, but it's just not a reality for us right now.

For now, we are including these digital exclusives as a way to promote the digital edition of the magazine and as an added incentive to pay (and thank you for paying) for a digital subscription. We won't be making them available on online or in print.